Column: Seton Hall has a blowout problem
The Pirates can’t continue the pattern of lopsided losses on the road if the committee is to take them seriously.
Seton Hall’s 85-64 loss at No. 12 Creighton on Wednesday night would be disastrous for the Pirates’ NCAA Tournament chances if Doug Gottlieb were on the selection committee.
To Gottlieb, the radio talker and former Oklahoma State guard, Seton Hall simply has no quality wins to speak of, his Twitter reply to Adam Zagoria on Sunday revealing that he just tuned into this college basketball season a few weeks ago.
The Pirates “have beaten the bottom of the league the last couple weeks… if they beat the top of the league coming up, they will be in…” Gottlieb wrote, accruing a beautifully front-loaded ratio of 19 replies, seven quote tweets and only four likes.
I’m not going to make the rest of this column about him, though I am going to need him to do 30 seconds of research before firing off his next take. Every misinformed post like this is another bullet in the metaphorical gun of anyone who wants to portray the entire media as liars or insidious or even just incompetent. You make it harder for the rest of us when you misuse your massive platform with this laziness.
But… I’ll give him this: It feels like forever since Seton Hall notched a really good win.
If, like Gottlieb, you’re just joining us, Seton Hall defeated UConn and Marquette – two of the five or six best teams in the country – early in the Big East season, and it topped a good Providence team on the road. But those Quadrant 1 wins keep getting memory-holed by amateur bracketologists online, so if you’re looking for which team stirs up the most aggressive disagreement over whether it should make the tournament, Seton Hall is your one-stop shop.
One loss isn’t going to deter me from the position I’ve taken: that barring a total collapse, Seton Hall should make the NCAA Tournament. It does concern me, though, that the Pirates’ predictive metrics lag far behind their resume.
Seton Hall is now 8-8 against the top two quadrants, and its strength of record is ranked a healthy No. 38. It’s also 56th in KenPom and 69th in the Basketball Power Index (BPI). If you want to know why, look at road games at Xavier, Marquette, Villanova and Creighton. Four of Seton Hall’s six league losses came by 18-26 points.
Those results, combined with some narrow wins over teams like Georgetown, mean Seton Hall’s average margin of victory in the Big East is a mere 1.8 points per game. In no way is this disqualifying for a team’s tournament chances, by the way; it just illustrates the kind of season Pirates fans have stomached. Close win, close win, noncompetitive loss.
Hall’s NET only slipped three spots from No. 61 to 64 this morning. Fans who have observed the team’s mediocre NET number all season were bracing for a much bigger drop, but perhaps the NCAA’s algorithm is a touch more forgiving to a road loss against a top-12 team.
Just as the first game and last game of a season count equally in the NET formulation, so it is with the first minute and last minute of a game, never mind if it’s already a blowout. That’s why Creighton kept its starters in nearly the entire way on Wednesday night. It got embarrassing for a Seton Hall group that had clearly checked out a while back.
But this game was over far before garbage time. It was over when Creighton had a 38-18 lead 100 seconds before halftime. After beating Butler, Al-Amir Dawes talked about wanting to land the first punch. But when the Pirates get this far behind, they don’t punch back.
“It’s not like they’re taking bad shots,” commentator Donny Marshall said in the second half. “To me it’s all about the effort. When you can’t close out on shooters when you’re playing a team like Creighton, to me it’s troubling. Seton Hall is known to gum things up and fight you.”
Shaheen Holloway revealed in his postgame radio interview that, while it isn’t an excuse, “A couple of guys were sick – a couple of guys stayed home and a couple of guys probably shouldn’t have played tonight.” That can go part of the way toward explaining lethargic closeouts on the perimeter. But the Pirates’ 3-point defense has been a season-long problem, and it’s known to lose them a game in a hurry.
Now, look: Every word of this column would be rendered moot if Seton Hall finds a way to go into Gampel Pavilion and complete a season sweep of UConn on Sunday. That would not only complete Hall’s resume but also shock the metrics back to life like a defibrillator to the heart.
It isn’t a “must-win,” either, since Villanova visits March 6. But maybe Seton Hall should treat it like one. The Pirates can’t continue the pattern of blowout losses on the road if the committee is to take them seriously.
“Every game from here on out, we’re fighting for our lives, and we didn’t come out tonight and fight for our lives,” Holloway said. “We’ve got to turn the page, obviously learn from this and fight on Sunday.”
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Thanks for stopping by on this Thursday. Let’s clean the glass with a lightning round, covering tonight’s games and what’s at stake for each N.J. team:
Michigan at Rutgers, 8:30 p.m.: For all the ups and downs of Rutgers’ season, the Scarlet Knights can still salvage an 8-12 finish in the Big Ten (which would still be their worst showing since 2018-19) just by beating cellar-dwellers Michigan and Ohio State at home. Lose this game, and you can kiss any remote chance of making the NIT goodbye – no way RU’s NET number would recover from that.
Monmouth at Hampton, 7 p.m.: The Hawks haven’t won a road game since upsetting West Virginia in the first week of the season. They finish the regular season this weekend on the road at Hampton (KenPom: 339) and Elon (KenPom: 311). The drought has to end at some point, doesn’t it? The Hawks would finish 11-7 in the CAA with a pair of wins, putting them in play for a double-bye in the conference tournament, though a bunch of other results would have to break their way.
Merrimack at FDU, 7 p.m.: The Knights are not yet guaranteed a top-four spot in the Northeast Conference’s final standings and a home game in the conference tournament. Merrimack is far and away the best team in the league and probably wants to stick it to FDU, after the Knights went to the NCAA Tournament in Merrimack’s place last year due to the Warriors’ ineligibility. Massive game in Hackensack.
UMBC at NJIT, 7 p.m.: This is a gettable game at home – NJIT already beat the Retrievers 75-74 in Maryland – for a team trying to avoid missing its conference tourney altogether. Ninth place in the nine-team league does not qualify. The Highlanders have just two games left to climb out of a 1 1/2-game hole, or else their season will already be over come Sunday morn.
Seton Hall: 38 SOR, 41 WAB, 56 KenPom, 64 NET
Princeton: 33 SOR, 30 WAB, 63 KenPom, 51 NET
Against common opponents Seton Hall was 2-1, +5ppg, all at home; Princeton was 3-0, +12ppg, one each home/road/neutral.
I'm only sort of trolling here - it's probably fair to overweight games against tournament-quality competition, where Seton Hall built its resume. But we should be clear that's what we're doing (and not penalize the next mid-major with a stronger top-end resume for taking two bad losses).